The use of wireless headsets in office and call centre environments is extremely popular. However, the infrastructure that supports the use of wireless headsets in such environments is facing an increasing number of challenges due to the continually increasing density of such headsets in a given space.
The preferred technologies used for wireless headsets are Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, DECT, and Bluetooth. However, both systems have limited bandwidth, which means that only a limited number of headsets can be used simultaneously within a given area. For example, DECT can only provide up to 120 channels for simultaneous communications to be taking place. In the modern call centre environment this is an insufficient number of channels.
One way to deal with this issue is to provide sufficient geographical separation to enable channel reuse, or by using different systems such as DECT and Bluetooth in parallel. However, spacing call centre workers out sufficiently to enable reuse of channels can be costly in terms of floor space and use multiple systems is far from ideal in terms of system maintenance.
In recent years, the use of wide band speech has increased which further reduces the number of available bands for DECT communications putting yet further stress on such infrastructure.
Current wireless office communications systems are therefore inadequate for the modern office and call centre environments.